new ideas

[dmitry]

Last night Victor and Philipp and i went to http://www.webinnovatorsgroup.com/
seminar -- all i can say is that the world is raving about being
environmentally sustained!

A very interesting web site -- http://makemesustainable.com. It
actually does remind me of another company that was also presented at
the webinno few month ago -- http://www.carbonrally.com. And of course
there is http://cleantogether.com , which I think is also very cool
idea, that ought to be presented at the web-inno some day (maybe in a
few month). So how does cleantogether compare to the other companies
that we saw? Those other web sites usually have a team of developers
that is working on the project for 3 to 5 year until they decide to
make a public alpha testing release. We just started (few month), not
too many developers (but potentially can be as many as couple of
dozen, or more...), and we are always in production -- we do not have
any alpha or even beta testing cycles -- everything we've got is
immediately available to the rest of the web.

So we are different. But been different is not easy. Been different
does not mean that we have to be completely different. As a matter of
fact we can learn a lot from the other projects. For example one of
the questions that was asked last night was "How do you ensure that
people are honest?", the answer was that the only way to keep people
honest is to keep away from a competition aspects and i agree, we
should also make sure that people do not compete on cleantogether.com,
but rather contribute to something really big and great as a part of a
community.
Another important thing that came up, how do we spread the word
around. The answer is to start integrating with the sites that already
have established presence. For example http://makemesustainable.com
uses facebook in order to build community around their idea. So we
should do too. If anyone is interested in learning what are the
integration points with the facebook and how to implement it, let me
know -- i already created a task in the issues list, but we should
probably have a little discussion before start working on the
implementation.
Another potential integration resource is digg.com. It's only an idea
-- i have no clue how this can be done, but wouldn't it be nice to use
diggs rating facilities rather then reinventing a wheel? Although, if
someone wants to write something from scratch -- i have no problmes
with that iether, we just need to have an open discussion about what
makes sense and how to do it better.

So, if anyone has any other ideas, feel free to post comments or even
create a new thread.

D>